The shame of our greedy residential house ‘developers’

In one of his most popular lays, Harry Belafonte — the great West Indian crooner — reminds us of something which all of Kenya’s money maniacs should already know. It is that “… a house built on a weak foundation will not stand …” Belafonte’s “house”, however, is probably a moral figure of speech.

What is flabbergasting is the situation in which the construction of real residential housing now finds itself in Kenya. What are erected by what our newspapers describe glibly and uncritically as “developers” are but so many rental structures which they very well know will catastrophically collapse within the year of first occupation.

We have arrived at a situation where, almost every week, houses under construction or already occupied suddenly come tumbling down, killing whole families and maiming many good Kenyans for life.

The tragedy, then, is that these “developers” know in advance that, in this, they are digging deep graves for their own compatriots.

This advance knowledge of the deathly consequences of their heinous activities should — in the language of our brother Willy Mutunga’s outfit — make many of our “developers” nothing less than mass murderers “aforethought”. In the Judiciary’s word book, murder aforethought means “premeditated killing”.

A person who puts up a perilously cheap structure so that it can make him or her quick money before the structure collapses is a mass murderer on an equal footing with Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin and Idi Amin Dada. In short, every Kenyan who puts up such an eggshell for human occupation is a capital criminal.

Nay, he or she may be worse than our world’s political devils because these others may not have premeditated the holocausts they later perpetrated. For instance, Jean Bedel Bokassa’s hecatomb might be seen as a consequence, and not as a cause – the tragic consequence of trying to salvage a situation which he himself had made unsalvageable.

The question is: Why do Kenya’s “developers” and other “entrepreneurs” do it? Why do so many so-called human beings lay such death traps for their own fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins and other members of the national family with whom happenstances of history have brought them into the same national house called Kenya?

The answer lies in our whole colonial and post-colonial mental upbringing and education. Like Nigeria, the deepening individualism colonially introduced to us no more than a century ago has made the pursuit of individual money the whole content of education and upbringing all the way from the cradle to the university.

Possession of money and other material goods is the measure of “success” that even members of the sacerdotal class — our very priestly teachers of “morality” — know. If the very peddlers of Jehovah and his agent Jesus are immersed in it up to the neck, how can Wanjiku fail to join Long John Silver’s retinue in our mad rush for Eldorado?

That is why I seek to enjoin in this case not only Willy Mutunga, the Chief Justice, but also my other brother Jacob Kaimenyi, who holds the Education docket in the Cabinet. A time is coming — “and now is” — when the two government officials and their aides must give justice and education brand new definitions.

How can we continue to pay such a back-breaking price for a situation so dangerous, where the school and the courtroom serve only to enable the well-placed individual to hold our young society to ransom by putting money well above humanity and thus mooring to the ground everything that might help us to grow up together in material and spiritual comfort and happiness?

While Prof Kaimenyi is looking for long-term answers to our many pressing educational questions, what is Mr Mutunga doing to pronounce real justice upon those who — like our “developers” — are so bent on denying so many Kenyans their right to safe and affordable residential comfort?

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